Inheritance of Acquired Characters 233 



Darwin attributes partly to natural selection and partly 

 to use. 



These references will suffice to show that Darwin is in full 

 accord with the main argument of Lamarck. In fact, the 

 curious hypothesis of pangenesis that Darwin advanced was 

 invented partly to account for the inheritance of acquired 

 characters. Despite the hesitancy that Darwin himself felt 

 in advancing this view, and contrary to Huxley's advice, he 

 at last published his provisional hypothesis of pangenesis in 

 the twenty-seventh chapter of his " Animals and Plants 

 under Domestication." 



Darwin's Hypothesis of Pangenesis 



The study of bud variation, of the various forms of inheri- 

 tance, and of reproduction and of the causes of variation, led 

 him, Darwin says, to the belief that these subjects stand in 

 some sort of relation to each other. He says : " I have been 

 led, or rather forced, to form a view which to a certain extent 

 connects these facts by a tangible method. Every one would 

 wish to explain to himself, even in an imperfect manner, how 

 it is possible for a character possessed by some remote 

 ancestor suddenly to reappear in the offspring; how the 

 effects of increased or decreased use of a limb can be trans- 

 mitted to the child ; how the male sexual element can act not 

 solely on the ovules, but occasionally on the mother form ; 

 how a hybrid can be produced by the union of the cellular 

 tissue of two plants independently of the organs of genera- 

 tion ; how a limb can be reproduced on the exact line of 

 amputation, with neither too much nor too little added ; how 

 the same organism may be produced by such widely different 

 processes, as budding and true seminal generation ; and, 

 lastly, how of two allied forms, one passes in the course of 

 its development through the most complex metamorphoses, 

 and the other does not do so, though when mature both are 



